


The Girl from Somewhere Else

by missjones



Series: The Girl from Somewhere Else [1]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-05-19 19:16:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5978188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missjones/pseuds/missjones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a spaceship crashes in the country, Captain Jack and his team meet a bright young girl from a distant planet none of them have ever heard of.<br/>When Jack realizes she has two hearts and came to Earth to find her father, he thinks it couldn't be more obvious: She must be the Doctor's daughter.<br/>But when she refuses to be reunited with her long-lost father, Jack is determined to find the key to her past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Crash

Farmer Gregson had not expected a spaceship to crash in his field that day. Not that he ever did expect it, I mean, who would?

Well, the people in the black van didn’t seem too surprised. Not ten seconds after the craft had hurtled from the clouds and plummeted onto his land, narrowly missing the cow shed, ‘Torchwood’ as they called themselves showed up and walked past his fence like this was their farm. Well, so what if they were investigating a possibly lethal extra-terrestrial invasion? They weren’t going to tell him to ‘shove off’ as the smeller man (Owen, was it?) so blatantly put it.

“This is my land,” he said to the man who seemed to be in charge of the operation. “And this thing is has damaged my property-”

“Our job is to investigate extra-terrestrial activity, not sell farming insurance,” said the man in the long navy coat. “And since this could be extremely dangerous, I would really suggest that you—”

“You’re not getting rid of me. I’m not going to be bossed about by some American—”

The insult died in the farmer’s throat as they reached the huge crater that inconveniently disrupted his cattle’s feeding ground. He could fit his house, the cattle, the trucks, and all the barns inside that crater, but all that was in it was a small metal craft.

Smoke billowed behind it like a big puffy tail, and around it small fires had sprung up. Pulling out their guns the team (besides Owen and the ‘Captain’ as he liked to call himself, was a dark-haired Welsh girl), climbed down to the bottom of the crater and approached the space craft. Gregson stupidly followed behind them, wishing he’d brought his shotgun.

Captain Jack motioned to his team to surround the alien ship, though he could hardly call it that, since it didn’t look like it could fit more than two people and certainly not comfortably.

Suddenly the door sprang open, emptying out another large puff of smoke, followed by a humanoid in what looked like a leather suite covering their whole body. Aside from the suite, they also had on some very clunky boot, thick gloves, and what looked like a motorcyclist helmet.

As the humanoid half-fell, half-jumped from the craft, Jack spoke. “State your planet of origin, race, and purpose for coming to Earth.”

As the smoke cleared, he could see that the humanoid was considerably short, not more than 5’3. He also appeared to have rather slanted shoulders—

The humanoid removed the helmet and long wavy hair spilled out of it onto said shoulders. Ah. She.

“Sorry,” she said, “could you repeat that?”

“State your planet of origin, race, and purpose for coming to Earth.”

She didn’t answer him right away, which caused him to wonder whether they had guns on her planet. She took her time, as she did a quick scan of her surroundings and started to peel off the thick gear.

“Rassilon, this stuff it hot, of course if I didn’t have it on, I’d be burnt to a crisp, but still—” She tossed away the helmet and gloves. “That’s a bit rude.”

“What?” That statement seemed kind of random.

“Asking me to first state where I’m from, what I am, and why I’m here, before first asking me my name,” she said as she unzipped her jacket, “I am a person you know, and I expect to be treated as such.”

“Oh, right, sorry,” he spared a look at his team who were giving him odd looks, waiting for him to regain authority. “Let me start again.”

He looked back at the girl, who had now discarded the thick leather jacket to reveal a very feminine figure indeed. Maybe this wasn’t the right way to introduce himself to a lady.

“Captain Jack Harkness,” he said in his well-practiced flirty tone, as he also holstered his gun and extended his hand in the kindest gesture he could manage under the current predicament. “And who are you?”

“That’s better,” she answered without looking at him. Instead she was peering back into her craft and seemed completely unaffected by Captain Jack’s seductive tone or the fact that she was outnumbered and had Owen’s and Gwen’s guns pointing at her. So much for regaining authority.

“Wait a sec,” she said as she jumped back in and started tossing things out. Out flew a coffee pot, a rumpled coat, one burnt sneaker, two broken computers, a couple wires, a piece of a kitchen stove, and a bunch of what was clearly alien technology. All of this she threw out carelessly until there was a cry of “Ah ha!” and she emerged with a stitched-up back pack that probably used to be light green.  
“Found it!” she exclaimed. Then she yanked off the boots, torn socks, and outer leather pants and started to rifle threw her sack.

“Jack,” said Gwen, looking at the captain questioningly.

“Answer the question,” Owen growled at the girl impatiently, “What do you want with this planet?!”

The girl looked up at him without taking her arm out of the sack. Now that the smoke had cleared they could see her more plainly. She was young, maybe eighteen to twenties, but it was hard to tell since they didn’t even know what species she was. She could be two centuries or five years old for all they knew. Wild blonde hair tumbled over her shoulders, and her eyes were light grey. In her plain T-shirt, jean shorts, and bare feet she could be a regular Earth girl enjoying a summer day (well, maybe not on this part of Earth).

She didn’t seem insulted by Owen’s tone, but she looked each one of them over, sizing them up with a look that suggested she was deciding whether they were worth her time. “I don’t believe that was the question Captain Harkness asked me,” she answered Owen, somehow managing to sound both cold and casual.

“Who are you?” asked Gwen, getting straight to the point.

“My name,” she said slowly, “is Zinthyia.”

“Hello, Zinthyia,” said Jack, “this is Owen and Gwen. We’re not here to hurt you, just to see what you’re doing here, that’s all. We don’t want to cause any trouble.”

She was about to say something else, when Farmer Gregson finally picked up some courage (and a little more stupidity). “You damaged my property,” he said to Zinthyia.

She studied him carefully as she pulled two items out of her bag. One was a double-breasted blue wool coat that looked like it had been through some hard times and the other was an old notebook stuffed with papers. She put on the coat and opened the notebook.

Zinthyia looked at a few charts and then up at the sky. “If I estimated my coordinates correctly, I should have landed in a farm in—”

“You planned to land here?!” the farmer shouted, his face getting red as a tomato. “I thought you just crashed! Now your bloody ship is—”

“Bloody?!” Zinthyia looked incredibly startled. “Oh my—DID I HIT SOMEONE?!”

“Um, no,” Jack cut in, “No, that’s just a figure of speech.”

“Oh good,” she sighed in relief. “I aimed for the country so I wouldn’t hurt anyone,” she pulled something else out of her bag and held it out to the farmer, “Here, take this, it’s a crystal from Venus. Just say it crashed here, you certainly have the evidence for that claim. It should be enough to pay for all the damage.”

Farmer Gregson looked incredulous. Actually, that’s quite an understatement; he looked like anyone else would if they were handed an extra-terrestrial crystal the size of a pineapple. He took it cautiously, as though it were an injured kitten.

Captain Jack wondered if it was a good idea to let a civilian keep a Venus crystal, but wisely decided against saying anything. It was damage payment after all. And besides the farmer would probably stick a pitchfork through him, and Jack knew from experience how much that hurt.

“Well now, if that’s settled,” said the captain, “I would very much like to hear your story, Zinthyia.”


	2. Memories and Pancakes

“Daddy, look!”

The Doctor glanced up from his book and saw her running towards him through the trees, silver leaves flying into the air at each footfall. As the sun light lit up her smile and her hair trailed behind her like a comet, he couldn’t help thinking, if stars were people this is what they’d look like.

When she reached him she held out her hands to show him what she’d found. It was a pebble, perfectly smooth, that nature had striped with shades of purple, blue, and grey.

“It’s beautiful,” he told her, and she beamed with pride as though she had crafted it herself. “But not as beautiful as you,” he said and reached out to pull her into his arms. “Look what I found! I found something beautiful too, and I’m not letting her go!”

He tickled her and she laughed, “Daddy, let go!”

“Hmm, why should I?” He kept tickling her and she kept laughing. Finally he stopped so she could breathe, and she climbed onto his lap.

As she admired her pebble she asked how it was made, so he made up a ridiculous story about ants trying to build space ships and the ships getting petrified in the attempt. She giggled and asked for the real answer. So he explained as simply as he could, knowing though that she mostly just wanted to hear his voice.

He felt more at peace that moment than he ever had before, and it stayed with him when he woke up. But then he realized it was a dream, and it felt like an arrow through his hearts.

*****

“—So then the king was furious and he ordered my execution, but I got out of it by hypnotizing the guards and then I stole the queen’s hippoturturibus and—”  
“The queen’s what?!” asked Owen.

“Hippoturturibus,” explained Zinthyia, “It’s basically a horse with a turtle shell on its back.”

“Oh.”

“So then I ended up in the desert with—” Zinthyia tried to continue, but Jack put up a hand to stop her.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, I really am,” and he meant it, it was a very exciting story, “but when I asked for the whole story I didn’t realize quite how long it was. Can you cut the part where you explain why you’re here?”

“Oh,” she thought for a moment, “well, I’m here because you wanted to talk to me and since I don’t know you I didn’t want to go to headquarters and so—”

“I meant on Earth,” Jack clarified, though he suspected she was just stalling while she figured out how much she could trust them.

“Ah, right,” she said, then she picked up her fork and poked at the plate in front of her.

Jack had taken them to a café where they could talk, because Zinthyia refused to go into the hub, which he had to admit was a smart move on her part. She didn’t know if they were trustworthy, and honestly they didn’t know if she was either.

She had ordered pancakes and tea, but she hadn’t taken a bite or a sip since they were put in front of her. Instead she’d been scanning them with what resembled a metal ruler with an iPod screen and appeared to be checking the ingredients. She stared at the plate like she’d never seen pancakes before (and too be fair she probably hadn’t) and sniffed the tea a few times. This behavior, along with her odd choice in wardrobe (aside from the fact she was wearing shorts and a T-shirt on a rather chilly day, she had also produced a pair of fuzzy blue slippers that apparently were the only other footwear she had after she had tossed out the ruined boots) were gaining her some extremely funny looks from the other customers. She didn’t seem to notice though, and had prattled on like she was catching up with old friends.

After she had moved the pancakes around a bit to see if they would pounce up (apparently this was a fear she had developed at a restaurant on a jungle planet run by small purple men) she took a sip of her tea with the amount of caution one would apply if they had to step over a mine.

After the ‘Earthian breakfast food’ had passed her tests she took a big gulp of tea and plopped the mug on the table where it splashed on her napkin, and then ate a big forkful of the pancake (which did not even attempt to run away).

“Well,” Zinthyia spoke between mouthfuls, “a couple centuries ago I left my home planet—”

“A couple centuries ago?” asked Gwen, “How old are you?”

Zinthyia thought for a moment. “Hard to keep track when you’re traveling the cosmos, but I think I’m—seven-hundred-and-eighty-four—maybe? Of course, I also got stuck in a time loop for who knows how long.”

“Wait, but how long is a year to you?” asked Owen, “’Cause since you’re not from Earth—”

Gwen and Owen looked like they were about to stray from the situation at hand so Jack intervened. “What planet are you from, Zinthyia?”

“Kaltarai,” she said, “It’s in the Stigalion galaxy.”

“Kaltarai,” Jack rolled the name on his tongue. Having grown up in the 51st century he had quite a vast knowledge of planets and alien races, but he had never heard that name before. Zinthyia seemed to know what he was thinking.

“You’ve probably never heard of it; it’s very off the map, not many civilizations there.”

“You came from there though,” he pointed out, “and you certainly have a good knowledge of technology.” That was an exaggeration, he knew; someone who could build their own spaceship from scrap was a genius, someone who could make it fly across the universe, actually hit their target, and survive was either from an advanced alien race or the future.

Zinthyia just shrugged her shoulders and said, “Since when are size and smarts the same thing?”

So, aside from finding out why she was here, the question he needed to answer was ‘Is she human?’ He couldn’t just ask that though, had to do it stealthily.

“So Zinthyia, is Katlarai—”

“Are you human?” asked Gwen. “From our future I mean.”

Well, gee, why don’t we just give her a pass port along with that escape? He thought angrily.

“No,” said Zinthyia truthfully.

Jack looked surprised (only for a second though) and asked, “What are you then?”

“A Kaltian. We’re pretty much the same as humans except for longer life spans and sharper memory.”

“So you’re not actually a three headed insect in disguise, then?” asked Gwen.

“Or a homicidal maniac with venomous porcupine quills about to sprout out your back?” asked Owen.

Zinthyia raised an eyebrow and laughed, “Are those the kind of aliens you usually run into?”

“On occasion,” said Owen.

“Right, so let’s cut to the chase all ready,” said Jack, “Why did you come to Earth?”

All three humans stared at the alien as she pushed the last bite of her pancake around the plate, not looking at them. Just when Jack was about to ask the question yet again, and more forcefully this time, she answered.

“I came to find my father.”


	3. Silver Leaves

Carefully shutting the door behind him, the Doctor leaned his head back to look up at the yellow sky. This planet was inhabited only by plants and animals, the closest thing to civilization here were the hives of bees and underground tunnels of rodents.

I light breeze swept the Doctor’s hair and filled his nose with sent of flowers and grass. It was so calm here. This planet had never seen a war, or a pandemic. It had never a crime committed or a dream broken. Nothing new ever happened here, the seasons changed in their usual pattern, and the animals just lived their lives of eat, sleep, survive. It was as perfectly peaceful as a planet could be. And for someone who loved peace so much, the Doctor sure hated it.

He hadn’t come here to relax though, or to find a new adventure. He’d come here to remember.

The yellow sky turned orange as the sun sank behind the mountains. The trees were filled with leaves of light blue, almost silver, and as they caught the last light of day that almost seemed to burn.

It looked very similar to the sunsets on Galifrey. The biggest difference of course, was that there was only one sun, not two. But there were many other differences, like the smoothness of these mountains compared the wild and jagged wilderness of Galifrey, or the fact that it just didn’t have the same scents and colors.

But it was close enough to bring tears to the Doctor eyes, which he did nothing to hold back. There was no one here to see him after all.

He remembered running in a wide field of red grass, until he reached a place where a clump of silver trees broke the pasture, like an oasis in the desert. It was a place he came too when he needed to think, study, or escape. He’d gone there with Koschei many times as kids, and when his old friend started calling himself the Master, he’d gone there alone to mourn what he’d thought was an unbreakable friendship.

He’d also gone to teach his children how to write. His son, who was the oldest, was doing wonderfully, putting together full sentences in the circular Galafreyan writing. He would be learning script and other forms of language soon.

His daughter was only four and much more content to draw squiggles and try to climb the trees. So he sat with his son, while she brought him pretty leaves and asked him to hold them so they wouldn’t blow away.

When the lesson was over she would take the leaves and crumble them up in her little hands, and then puff out her cheeks and blow them into the air, before racing her brother home.

When the tears finally stopped falling, the Doctor brushed them away with his sleeve and pulled himself out of the painful memory. Then, as he turned to go back to his ship, he pulled a blue leaf from a nearby tree and crumbled it in his hand. Then he blew it into the air and watched the pieces catch the slowly draining light, so that they shined like sparks.

As the TARDIS whooshed and vanished it sent the broken leaf back into the air, where it was carried away by the wind, taking only a little of the Doctor’s pain with it.

 

*****  
Jack couldn’t help it. He liked Zinthyia. It wasn’t because she was clearly lost and trying to pretend she wasn’t, or that she was a little bit of the space/time traveling life he sourly missed, though those certainly added to his interest.

It was because she reminded him of the Doctor. There was no way around it; anybody who had ever met the Time Lord could see him in her as if she was brandishing a sonic screwdriver and shouting ‘fantastic!’ or ‘allons-y!’

First there were the obvious details like ‘alien’ and ‘genius’. Then there was her rambling speech (she was currently going on about how she got the biplex accelerator for her home-made space ship on the ocean moon of Saturn Nine), and her bubbly know-it-all attitude. And then there was her style. Besides her wild hair that reminded him so much of the Doctor’s handsomest incarnation, there was her choice in footwear.

Apparently they were the only thing she had, and it’s not the fact they didn’t match her clothes that made him think so much the quirky alien, it was the fact that nobody else would wear them. Aside from the fact that they weren’t even actual shoes, they were too ridiculous for anyone to be taken seriously in. It’s not that he had ever seen the Doctor wear such a thing, but he couldn’t think of anyone with enough confidence to wear blue, polka dotted, fuzzy, slippers in public.

Of course, she was a girl, so that made it a bit different, but still?!

“I haven’t seen him in centuries,” Zinthyia was saying as Jack pondered how her bedroom slippers weren’t getting soaked as they walked down the very wet sidewalk. She was telling him about her dad. Apparently she had been separated from him a long time ago (a very long time ago, since he was pretty sure she was not using ‘centuries’ as a metaphor), and had traveled across the universe to try to find him.

They were simply wandering as she told him her story. Owen and Gwen had left to get work done (Gwen had had to be reminded about six times) so it was just Jack and Zinthyia.

He had nodded in grim acceptance when she told him in little to no detail of her separation from her family. All he could get was that there was some kind of war and she had been forced to leave her home planet in a hurry. Remembering his own past, he decided not to press for details.

“But why Earth?” he asked.

“I found reports that said he’d been in Britain, in the twenty-first century. Once I figured out what planet ‘Britain’ was on, I headed here.” She looked away from him so he couldn’t read her expression, but her tone sounded downcast. “I didn’t have anything else to go on.”

Jack found it immensely admirable that a young girl (she was clearly young for her species, despite the centuries) went to such extraordinary lengths to find her lost father, and he couldn’t help but let out a bark of laughter at the dissatisfaction she had in herself.

“Look, Kid,” he told her, “Britain may be a big place, and you may not know exactly when or where he’ll show up, but if you can build your own spaceship and safely fly it across the universe you can sure as hell do anything.”

She smiled at that. “Well . . . I don’t know about safely . . .”

*****  
“You threw a hairbrush at the general?!” Jack laughed as he opened the hotel room door. He was paying for the room, because Zinthyia was still refusing to come to the hub and Jack couldn’t leave her with no money and nowhere to go.

“Well, it was all I had. In the split second that he was shocked I managed to pull out the wires and stop the androids.” Zinthyia tossed her bag on the couch and collapsed next to it.

“Then what did you do?”

She smiled. “I ran.”

They both laughed and Zinthyia thanked him for the fourth time for the hotel room.

“Hey, it’s no problem,” he said, “And I couldn’t just leave you alone on an alien planet.”

“I thought your job was to fight aliens, not give them a place to stay.”

“I’m making in exception for you.”

They chatted about her adventures for another hour, before Jack’s phone rang. When he answered, Ianto gave him an address and told him they needed him so he left Zinthyia with a promise he would check up on her later.

Though they acted friendly enough towards each other, Jack knew that she still didn’t trust him. Despite her social manner, he’d noticed how she sat on the side of the couch that was closest to the door, with her bag right beside her in case she needed to grab it in a hurry; and how she’d always faced him, never turning her back, though she did it with a kind smile. Jack couldn’t blame her for not trusting him though, after all, when she’d first met he’d been pointing a gun at her. And besides, he didn’t really trust her either. She may seem harmless, but he’d known many villains that did too. But the main reason he didn’t trust her was that he was positive she was lying about where she came from. As a time agent he’d had to study the Stigalion Galaxy and he remembered those lessons well (mainly because it was home to some of the most gorgeous aliens). There was no planet named Kaltarai.


End file.
